This is a comparative study on the subject of interrogativity, presenting broad and narrow attributes on this subject in diverse languages: Russian, Mandarin, Georgian, Bengali, Bantu, Japanese, West Greenlandic and Ute. Each contribution presents, first the basic facts about the language in question, its more recent provenience, facts about numbers of speakers, writing systems, and related areal and sociolinguistic points. An overview of the typological hallmarks follows together with a sketch of the grammar broadly construed. Finally, the grammar of interrogativity is described and the semantics and pragmatics of it are explored.
The One Mind: C. G. Jung and the Future of Literary Criticism explores the implications of C. G. Jung's unus mundus by applying his writings on the metaphysical, the paranormal, and the quantum to literature. As Jung knew, everything is connected because of its participation in universal consciousness, which encompasses all that is, including the collective unconscious. Matthew A. Fike argues that this principle of unity enables an approach in which psychic functioning is both a subject and a means of discovery—psi phenomena evoke the connections among the physical world, the psyche, and the spiritual realm.
In discourse, verbal messages are framed: speakers offer cues on the basis of which hearers are able to anchor the verbal message to the context. Furthermore, speakers cannot contribute to the discourse without at the same time showing their view on the subject matter of the discourse: the content of a discourse is necessarily ‘displayed’ from a certain perspective. Both the framing and perspectivising of verbal messages are not static, but subject to possible changes during the development of the discourse.
The ten papers in this volume focus on Subject and Theme. Theme began its life as a semantic notion in the work of Vilém Mathesius, while Subject has traditionally been seen as just a syntactic entity. More recently two related perspectives on these concepts have attracted linguists' attention: the formal criteria for their recognition and the relations between the two concepts. Using the systemic functional model as their point of departure, the papers in the present volume consider the two notions in a wider context by relating them to the interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language.
Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a natural point of entry to what for most readers will be a new subject.
The authors' approach is an attractive blend of no-nonsense argumentative directness and open-minded liberalism, and they convey the exciting and unexpected richness of their subject. Mathematicians and linguists, as well as logicians and philosophers, will find surprises in this book.
